is losinghas long since lost
These sites need to start allowing users to blacklist sites from results. We know which sites are useless but keep showing up, let us block them from showing up.
That’s a great idea. I wonder if there is already an extension for this.
It would be great if it were built into the search engine. They could publicize the top 100 blocked sites to hopefully change the behavior of these sites.
It’s comically bad now
At work, we have this tradition of naming our video call channels with random emojis.
Yesterday, I named it 🎍 and a colleague asked what that emoji is supposed to be.
The thing is, I had this conversation with another colleague before, when I chose that same emoji some months ago.
In the emoji selector, it’s called “pine decoration”, so as Firefox readily told me, I had searched for those exact words before, in this case on Qwant, not Google.
So, I directly opened that search result link from the browser history and the first page of search results just showed random Etsy links and such. For now, it still looks the same: https://www.qwant.com/?q=pine+decoration&t=web
When I searched it a few months ago, I was amazed that the first link, along with the whole inline-Wikipedia-blurb, was the relevant result: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kadomatsu
(This was also still in my browser history.)
I don’t need to be amazed every time, but fuck me, it feels like the internet is having Alzheimer’s.
I’m kind of concerned about search engines currently. Not that they’ll never exist but that they’ll fall to SEO stuff since major tech companies chosen option seems to be to pursue AI solutions. As great as I think they can be even if they’re flawed, they just aren’t a replacement for a traditional search.
Hell even DuckDuckGo is failing me now.